The paper noted a gulf between global efforts to reduce the climate impacts of deforestation, and the dearth of a global response to the climate impacts of food production.
#California's Drought Is Part of a Much Bigger Water Crisis Why do I keep hearing about the California drought,
if it's the Colorado river that we're"killing"?"Pretty much every state west of the Rockies has been facing a water shortage of one kind or another in recent years.
California's is a severe, but relatively short-term, drought. But the Colorado river basinhich provides critical water supplies for seven states including Californias the victim of a slower-burning catastrophe entering its 16th year.
Wyoming, Colorado, New mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and California all share water from the Colorado river, a hugely important water resource that sustains 40 million people in those states, supports 15 percent of the nation's food supply,
and fills two of largest water reserves in the country. The severe shortages of rain and snowfall have hurt California's $46 billion agricultural industry
and helped raise national awareness of the longer-term shortages that are affecting the entire Colorado river basin.
But while the two problems have commonalities and have some effect on one another, they're not exactly the same thing.
Just how bad is the drought in California right now? Most of California is experiencing"extreme to exceptional drought,
and ordered cities and towns to cut water use by as much as 36 percent. Those who don't comply with the cuts will face fines,
while water shortages are making firefighters'jobs even harder. And a little bit of rain won't help.
"Killing the Colorado"has shown that people are entitled to more water from the Colorado than has flowed through it, on average, over the last 110 years.
Meanwhile much of the water is lost, overused or wasted, stressing both the Colorado system, and trickling down to California,
Explosive urban growth matched with the steady planting of water-thirsty crops which use the majority of the water don't help.
Arcane laws actually encourage farmers to take even more water from the Colorado river and from California's rivers than they actually need,
and federal subsidies encourage farmers to plant some of the crops that use the most water.
And, as Propublica has reported, it seems that"the engineering that made settling the West possible may have reached the bounds of its potential"eaning that even the big dams
and canals we built to ferry all this water may now be causing more harm than good.
Water use policieserhaps more than natureave caused the water crisis in the West. As the former Arizona governor and U s. Secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt told Propublica:"
"There is enough water in the West but there are all kinds of agriculture efficiencies that have not been put into place."
"While there are mixed views on whether climate change can be blamed for California's drought, a recent National oceanic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) reportfound climate change was not the cause.
Global warming has caused excessive heat that may have worsened the drought's effects, but it isn't necessarily to blame for the lack of rain.
But in both California and the larger Colorado river basin mismanagement of the water supply has left the West more vulnerable to both short and long-term changes in climate.
When officials divvied up rights to Colorado river water nearly a century ago, it happened to be a wetter period than usual.
The states vastly overestimated the river's annual flow. Today, the river's reserves are especially low
and states are stillclaiming the same amount of water from the Colorado river that they always have hich is 1. 4 trillion gallons a year more than the river actually produces.
This sort of oversubscription is similar in California, where historic water rights give many farms first rights to California's streams and rivers,
and haven't been adjusted as the state's population has increased and its cities have grown. Waiton't we all have equal water rights?
when it comes to water."("Yuhas made the unfortunate mistake of complaining on social media that he
and his neighbors deserve more water because they pay more property taxes, and"should not be forced togolf on brown lawns,
To the uninitiated,"water law"is arcane and confusingence the need for, yes, water lawyers.
Sometimes, water law seems to defy common sense. For instance, in Colorado, if you put a barrel in your yard to collect rainwater for your plants,
under water law,"nearly every drop is spoken for.""But the underlying rule of water in the West is that the first people to show up
and claim it were the first people to get it, and everyone who came after took a place further back in line.
Called"prior appropriation,"this remains the dominant thread in Western water issues, more than 100 years later.
So where is all this water going? For all of the warnings people in the West get about taking shorter showers and turning off sprinklers,
the fact remains that agriculture uses the most water, by far. Farming and agriculture use more than 70 percent of the water that flows from the Colorado river to the seven river basin states.
In addition to those crops, cotton is one of the thirstiest crops a farmer can grow, especially in a desert.
many of the crops that use less water entitle farmers to fewer federal subsidies, and so farmers don't have much of an incentive to switch crops.
On top of subsidies,"Use it or Lose it"clauses in state water laws actually encourage farmers to flood their fields with much more water than they need
lest they lose the right to that amount of water in the future. Urban development is also a big factor.
For all its problems, Las vegas pioneered ways to save water and incentivize efficiency more than a decade ago that Los angeles is only beginning to adopt today.
What is California doing to address its water problems? Is it working? Californians do seem to be answering the call to use less water in their daily lives after Gov. Jerry brown imposed cutbacks in March.
The state's"water czar,"Felicia Marcus, continues to crack down on water waste, and creative ad campaigns are finding varying degrees of success. The state has cut deliveries of water to farmers through the state and federal aqueduct systems,
and is now beginning to tackle the tough tasks of reforming water rights and curtailing some of the state's most senior users.
The federal government is also sending millions of dollars in"drought aid""and local counties are exploring how to desalinate ocean water to replenish water supplies.
Some enterprising individuals are even proposing to revive old plans to tow icebergs or haul water down from Alaska.
Meanwhile, like any prolonged crisis, the drought is drawing out the best and worst in people.
Some people are conscientiously conserving water in their homes in little waysy not washing their cars
or by capturing shower water from inside for their gardens outside, for instance. The drought has inspired also innovation in water conservation for restaurants, pools and lawns.
Meanwhile, others have been caught stealing water from their neighbors and drought-shaming campaigns have multiplied online. To the extent that climate change exacerbates the drought
The Los angeles Department of Water and Power is now also selling its stake in the Navajo Generating station to invest in clean energy alternatives,
though the plant (which generates more climate-warming gases than almost any other plant in the nation) will continue pumping Colorado river water to Arizona.
Will California cutbacks alleviate the larger Colorado river problem? California uses almost one-third of the entire Colorado river flow,
having a larger share than any other Colorado river basin state. California gets 16 percent of its surface waterater that comes from snowpack, streams and riversrom the Colorado river via two huge aqueducts.
The California Aqueduct runs beneath mountains into Riverside County and eventually toward Los angeles, providing a substantial supply for both L a. and San diego. The All-American Canal moves water along the tail-end of the Colorado river near the Mexican border, nourishing one of the state's most valuable agriculture areas,
Imperial County, where a large proportion of the nation's winter fruits and vegetables are grown. Of the seven basin states, California holds the most senior legal rights to the Colorado,
which entitle it to keep drawing water even as Lake Mead runs dry and the rest of the Colorado river states suffer through shortages.
That means in the short term, not much that California does will change the situation on the Colorado,
unless it were to voluntarily surrender more of its entitlement to the river. But should Colorado river shortages worsen to the point that the states ever re-negotiate that division of water
a reduction of California's Colorado river water rights could have a brutal impact on California's remaining supplies.
Officials in California, like every other state in the region, are now facing a"new normal,
"as nature places new limits on the state's previously unchecked growth. I don't live in California or the West,
so water shortages there affect food supply everywhere. Calculations by the Pacific Institute indicate that, by eating food grown in California,
each American indirectly uses more than 300 gallons of the state's water each week. Almonds, which require a comparatively huge amount of water to produce,
have become the most visible scapegoat for an enormous problem of which they are only one small part.
One almond takes almost an entire gallon of water to produceut so does a tiny slice of cantaloupe
In fact, some of the biggest"water hogs,"indirectly, are meat and Dairy cows and chickens and other animals eat a lot of crops,
which in turn require a lot of water. So it takes 86 gallons of water to make just 1. 75 ounces of beef.
Some research has suggested that the country's meat industries create such a high demand for water-thirsty feed crops, that if every American ate meat one less day a week,
it could save as much water as flows through the Colorado river in an entire year. Regardless
if the water crisis gets worse, Americans across the country can expect the cost of their food to go up,
and some of it, perhaps, to not be available at all. Power prices may also rise as hydroelectric plants have difficulty generating with low water flowsnd to the extent that very complicated power distribution affects a larger region,
consumers far away from the Colorado river basin might feel the pinch. Finally, California and the rest of the Colorado river basin amount to the world's seventh largest economy,
and contribute significantly to the country's GDP. When California struggles economically the nation is close behind.
For more on this story, read how federal dollars are financing the water crisis in the West,
how Las vegas'water chief preached conservation while backing growth and all about the power plant that's fueling America's drought.
Suits and Spooks London-May 6-7, 2015download Free Security Resources from the Securityweek White paper Libraryciso Forum-Half moon Bay, CA-May 20, 201 1
both X-37bs could fit inside the payload bay of NASA's now-retired space shuttle orbiter.
or injecting water or other liquids into the plasma sheath to make it more permeable to radio signals,
and tasting room in Denver's River North neighborhood e
#Smart oven knows what is inside and how to cook it For those who just can get their heads around the intricacies of home cooking,
sanitation and as rust-free metals Scientists at the University of Rochester have used lasers to transform metals into extremely water repellent,
And it is these patterns that make the metals repel water. he material is so strongly water-repellent,
the water actually gets bounced off. Then it lands on the surface again, gets bounced off again,
you need to tilt the surface to nearly a 70-degree angle before the water begins to slide off.
As the water bounces off the super-hydrophobic surfaces, it also collects dust particles and takes them along for the ride.
Roughly half of the dust particles were removed with just three drops of water. It took only a dozen drops to leave the surface spotless.
collecting rain water is vital and using super-hydrophobic materials could increase the efficiency without the need to use large funnels with high-pitched angles to prevent water from sticking to the surface,
says Guo. second application could be creating latrines that are cleaner and healthier to use.
Latrines are a challenge to keep clean in places with little water. By incorporating super-hydrophobic materials
a latrine could remain clean without the need for water flushing. But challenges still remain to be addressed before these applications can become a reality, Guo states.
The combination of light-absorbing properties with making metals water repellent could lead to more efficient solar absorbers solar absorbers that don rust
meaning they attract water. In fact, the materials were so hydrophilic that putting them in contact with a drop of water made water run phill.
Guo team is now planning on focusing on increasing the speed of patterning the surfaces with the laser,
as well as studying how to expand this technique to other materials such as semiconductors or dielectrics, opening up the possibility of water repellent electronics.
Perovskites are damaged easily by heat and readily dissolve in water. This inherent instability ruled out virtually all of the conventional techniques for applying electrodes onto the perovoskite solar cell
But if you expose perovskite to water or light it likely will degrade. We have a ways to go to show that perovskite solar cells are stable enough to last 25 years.
in order to maneuver the ship on the open sea while also maintaining a constant speed, it is equipped with an environmentally friendly
They were then able to gently scrape some of the silver to leave behind two islands of metal as electrodes, with a strip of silicene between them.
Wee been able to find out what in the water, the feed and the air, he said.
and purify water. But all these possible uses face the same big hurdle: the need for a scalable and cost-effective method for continuous manufacturing of graphene films.
For example, want to pick up that cup of water, 'Andersen says. o in this trial, we were successfully able to decode these actual intents,
say, pick up a glass of water to sip it, or feed themselves. They can even do anything if their nose itches.
#Who needs water to assemble DNA? Non-aqueous solvent supports DNA NANOTECHNOLOGY Scientists around the world are using the programmability of DNA to assemble complex nanometer scale structures.
Until now, however, production of these artificial structures has been limited to water-based environments, because DNA naturally functions inside the watery environment of living cells.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of technology have shown now that they can assemble DNA NANOSTRUCTURES in a solvent containing no water.
They also discovered that adding a small amount of water to their solvent increases the assembly rate
we have shown that DNA NANOSTRUCTURES can be assembled in a water-free solvent, and that we can mix water with the same solvent to speed up the assembly.
We can also take the structures that were assembled in this solvent mixed with water emove the water by applying vacuum
and have the DNA structures remain intact in the water-free solvent. The assembly rate of DNA NANOSTRUCTURES can be very slow,
and depends strongly on temperature. Raising the temperature increases this rate, but temperatures that are too high can cause the DNA structures to fall apart.
and adding water can adjust the solvent viscosity, which allows for faster assembly compared to the water-free version of the solvent. his solvent changes the rules,
said Isaac Gállego, a postdoctoral researcher in Hud lab and the paper first author. e now have a tool that controls DNA assembly kinetics and thermodynamics all in one solvent.
Glycholine is miscible in water, so it can be mixed in any ratio with water to control the kinetics of the assembly process.
For instance, one structure that assembles in six days in pure solvent will assemble in three hours in a glycholine solution containing 10 percent water.
A key feature of the new solvent system is that it does not require changes to existing DNA NANOTECHNOLOGY designs that were developed for water. ou can go back
and forth between hydrated and non-hydrated states, said Gállego. his solvent system preserves the DNA structures that have been developed to work in water.
The solvent system could improve the combined use of metallic nanoparticles and DNA based materials. In the typical aqueous solvents where DNA NANOTECHNOLOGY is performed,
The solvent low volatility could also allow storage of assembled DNA structures without the concern that a water-based medium would dry out.
In future work, they hope to use the control provided by water-free solvents to obtain dynamic DNA structural rearrangements that are not possible in water,
both at Georgia Tech. hat was surprising was finding a solvent that allows the assembly of structures more easily than in water.
because DNA NANOTECHNOLOGY was developed in water. The research on water-free solvents grew out of Georgia Tech research into the origins of life.
Hud and colleagues had wondered if the molecules necessary for life, such as the ancestor of DNA, could have developed in a water-free solution.
In some cases, he noted, the chemistry necessary to make the molecules of life would be much easier without water being present. his work was inspired by research into the origins of life with the basic question of
whether complex DNA structures could exist in non-aqueous solvents, and we showed that they can,
which has also been adapted for use on King Island Smart Grid. e want to give households an energy management tool that is simple to use
or attract water, controlling the motion and turbulence of fluids, and limiting the buildup of organisms on surfaces such as ship hulls.
Beebe says scaling down the testing environment in the group research is akin to moving from a lake to a bathtub:
another had components that were soluble in water. e complete the cycle from birth through life, activity,
This new method is a bit like scaling down from a lake to a bathtub as scientists describe it.
are tiny islands of magnetism that form in certain materials. If you wrapped one up into a sphere, its magnetic fields would point away in all different directionso they stay in neat little packages
because even simple dirty water has a lot of organic matter. Ability to generate small amounts of power from bacteria is very appealing for anyone working in remote areas.
Only 5 cents costing device that is so innovative that can produce power from dirty water would seem as science fiction some time ago,
because the materials can assemble in water instead of more toxic organic solutions that are used widely today. nce you make the materials,
you can dump them into water and they assemble into the appropriate structure because of the way the materials are designed,
with one end that was water-loving or hydrophilic and one that was water-fearing or hydrophobic.
A mixture of these molecules self-assembled into a vesicle, much like the coalescing of oil droplets in water,
with the hydrophobic ends pointing inward and the hydrophilic ends pointing outward. The result was millions of bubble-like structures, each 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
and transported a patch of the nanowire carpet on water droplets that were used used to deliver it to the site of injury.
After absorbing water, they and the tissue they comprise expand in such a way that entire plant parts move in a defined pattern.
which was able to simulate water flow in carbon nanotubes at very low speeds an activity that would normally require the equivalent of up to 40,000 years of processing power on a single computer.
simulations of water flow in carbon nanotubes could only be carried out under unrealistically high flow-rate conditions says the Director of CNMM, Quanshui Zheng. hanks to World Community Grid,
which will become essential to analyze the massive data generated by the volunteered computers. y simulating water molecules flowing through nanotubes we have shown how vibrations result in oscillating friction,
leading to enhancements in the rate of water diffusion of more than 300 percent. Ultimately this will help design new carbon nanotube based membranes for water filtration with reduced energy consumption. rowd-sourced computing power was essential to the success of our project.
Wakes occur whenever something is traveling through a medium faster than the waves it creates in the duck case water waves, in the plane case shock waves,
was made in the lab of Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of engineering and Applied science (SEAS).
Capasso team designed a faster-than-light running wave of charge along a one-dimensional metamaterial like a powerboat speeding across a lake.
or cameras, said co-lead author Antonio Ambrosio of SEAS and the Italian Research Council (CNR).
This work could represent a new testbed for wake physics across a variety of disciplines. his research addresses a particularly elegant and innovative problem in physics which connects different physical phenomena, from water wakes to sonic booms,
and Cherenkov radiation, said Patrice Genevet, a lead author, formerly of SEAS, currently affiliated with the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology I
and others such as water or ethylene glycol that take in heat when they transform from a solid to a liquid.
and release a large amount of heat energy (230 kj L#1). This heat energy stored is large at approximately 70%of the latent heat energy of water at its melting point.
#NEC Conducts Water Leak Detection Trial for the City of Arlington, Texas NEC Corporation, NEC Corporation of America,
and the City of Arlington, Texas, today announced the successful conclusion of a water leak detection trial project for the city.
NEC delivers cutting-edge technology that offers municipal water utility companies a cost-effective way to manage water resources to help meet the water needs of the communities they serve.
and then can be used to identify the locations of water leaks. The project with the city of Arlington is the first of its kind conducted by NEC in the United states. During the course of this project,
Three water leaks were identified during the four months trial and have been repaired. This is the first step for the City to develop a long-term leak detection strategy by evaluating current leak detection technology. he City was pleased with the outcome of this project
says Darryl Westbrook, assistant director of Water Utilities, the City of Arlington. EC is committed to using innovative technology to help strengthen
and how that process can go wrong. he fact that we used patient-derived human pluripotent stem cells in our work represents a sea change in the field,
we believe it will be particularly effective in supporting vaccination in developing countries. he new microneedle patch Microhyala is dissolvable in water.
the solvent would be water and the salt would be something like sodium chloride, for instance. However
which showed that by adding just a little bit of water into the batterieselectrolyte mixture, the researchers were able to make the lithium air batteries last four to five times longer. owever,
adding water is not a perfect solution, because it comes at the cost of being able to recharge the battery,
while water increased the battery capacity, it also catalyzed additional parasitic reactions, which prevented the batteries from being recharged.
#Plankzooka Larval Sampler May Revolutionize Deep ocean Research Scientists have conducted successfully the first high-volume collection of plankton,
from the deep ocean using a new sampling device mounted on a robotic submarine. Scientists and engineers from Duke university, the University of Oregon and Woods hole oceanographic institution (WHOI) deployed the new sampler nicknamed Plankzooka for its uncanny resemblance to two bazooka rocket launchers on July 9 during a research expedition aboard the RV Atlantis
off the U s. East Coast. Unlike sampling devices used in the past, which often damaged the delicate planktonic specimens they collected,
the new Sentry Precision Robotic Impeller Driven (Syprid) sampler uses spinning blades inside tubes to gently pump large volumes of water,
Genetic and morphological analyses will be conducted on the preserved specimens after the expedition returns to shore. he Syprid sampler can allow us to gain a much clearer picture of where the larvae go
and where they concentrate in the deep ocean, said Craig Young, director of the Oregon Institute of Marine biology (OIMB).
he uniqueness of this system is its ability to sample precise areas, at depth, for long periods of time while filtering enough volume to find the relatively rare organisms in the water.
Natural methane seeps play an important but poorly understood role in the ocean ecosystem. The organisms that depend on methane from the seeps play a substantial role
not only in the marine food web but also in altering the quantity of methane released to the ocean surface and, potentially, in the overall chemistry of the ocean.
Scientists lack a clear understanding of how sedentary or slow-moving animals move between the widely separated seeps,
and how resilient these ecosystems may be in the face of ocean change. Studying the microscopic planktonic larval stages of these animals may shed light on many of these processes.
and within five meters of any desired point or pattern of points in more than 95 percent of the world oceans, Kaiser said. his could revolutionize how we sample not only larvae
but all plankton in the deep ocean, said Van Dover. e can now pick and choose where we sample,
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